8 ms·
Show HN: HackerBooks.com
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoMy wife and I made this site to make it easier to find tech-related books. It's fairly simple so far and more features are planned. I'm submitting early on to get some wider feedback. Thanks to all the HNers that reviewed this before today already!
- sgruhier 16y agoVery useful and damn fast!
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoAs quite a few have asked via the comment form: it's a nginx + passenger + ruby 1.9.2 stack, with solr for indexing, mongodb for data back-end, rails fragment caching in redis, and a warmup script to fill the caches.
- rapind 16y agoThat's a great stack. Any reason you went with Redis for the caching instead of memcached?
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoWell I'm more used to Redis, as I've used more than a couple of times with Resque (job processing in Ruby). I started the crawler behind HackerBooks with Resque and Redis, but ended up saving some RAM by going back to a simple daemon. I reused Redis to provide the caching. So well: I mostly used what I was used too.
- rapind 16y agoDefinitely makes sense if you're already using Redis for something else.
- albedoa 16y agoSweet domain name. Did you have to shell out a lot for it?
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoI spent a bit of time on that, I must admit :) In the end I paid 90$ for 3 years, which is OK I guess.
- hessenwolf 16y agoon that note, hackertext, hackermenu, hackerledger, hackerconventions, hackerelite, hackerplans, hackermanifest, hackerstatement, hackerplay, hackersection, hackervolumes, etc... all seem to be free. (shameless plug for nametoolkit.com - downvote me if you wish ;))
- taylorbuley 16y agoThose who code together, stay together! Or was it the opposite?
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoWe're going to work together on a SAAS product and became associates (after moving to the countryside). Wish us luck :) (and communication, it's needed :-)
- TobiasCassell 16y agoThank you for building this. I admire the simplicity and elegance. Would be cool if the "Mentioned 2 times at Hackernews" was hyperlinked to the mention. Can this be done?
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoIt will totally be done :) Next iteration will be on making the navigation better, so that you can click on everything that's possible.
- dmarinoc 16y agojust curious... how do you parse (and find the titles) from SO and HN? Only checking from publishers/distributors links? Keep the good work. I love it :) My only suggestion is to offer a ranking and order the results by # of quotes
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoGlad you like it! Really :) On parsing: it's actually a somewhat fastidious process that involve digesting a couple of GB of data, but here is the bottom line. I look for amazon.com links in the content in general - I will broaden that to other publishers and full-text extraction too later on. The content itself comes from the StackOverflow dump (for SO) and a mixture of a crawler allowed by PG + the previous database dump that was available at some point. I extract all the books, quotes, users data from both, conform these into a common schema, and index the whole result. Hope I answered your question properly - feel free to ask again if you'd wish. On ranking: I know what you mean! I need to find some way to balance number of quotes with textual relevance, which requires me to dive a bit more into solr. I currently use textual relevance first because it gives more useful results so far.
- HackrNwsDesignr 16y agoAre you making any revenue from referrals?
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoThe site is just released, so it's currently 0$ :) We'll see how it goes.
- dmarinoc 16y agoThanks :) For ranking, instead of textual relevance (which will be hard to achieve :/) and # of quotes (it can be easily hacked/spammed or new announced books will have a huge weight on the ranking), I suggest you to check timelines: if a book is quoted once/twice/... a month regularly, I'm pretty sure it worths reading it I'll love to read about the architecture behind the site... yep, technically curious :)
- rhizome 16y agoI like it! You might add links to the questions so people can see from the references what ground the book covers.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoGlad you like it - it's planned really: you will be able to click on discussions, "quoter", author etc. I will make it more explorable.
- rhizome 16y agoI'm a nobody, but consider making the pages less clicky and more product page-y, with the external references that provide the structure of your site constituting something of a "topics covered in this book." I think the references/links should be at least as prominent as the book blurb that currently serves to authoritatively describe the contents. My point is that the contents may actually be described (for sufficient numbers of refs) better by listing how people are actually recommending it, how its readers are using it. You could even implement a semantic parser that constructs a new book blurb based on the words and sentences in the recommendations and references. :) Anyway, good luck!
- thibaut_barrere 16y agothanks for the suggestion!
- instakill 16y agoAwesome site. Is there any way you can add a filter for "free" for ebooks?
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoShould be doable most likely. I added it to the backlog, thanks!
- chintan100 16y agoAwesome site! Verrrry useful for SOers and HNers. I dont know if there is an API for it or not but if you can get the Amazon rating of a book and display it on the book description page, it will be great. :)
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoThanks! On AZ ratings: I wrote that down. It's somewhat complicated because Amazon just made it a bit harder to embed that. It now has to be an iframe; the iframe url must be refreshed every 24 hours. But overall this should be doable to, I'll see if I can make it usable. Thank you!
- quan 16y agoI found AZ ratings to be mostly useless, what would be better is the total number HN/SO points accumulated from all the recommendations for that book. edit: not a mix, but separate points for each community
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoMmm - a kind of book karma. Something like mixing the karma of the commenter with the heatness of the discussion etc ? I think being able to filter on SO vs HN would definitely give different results, too. The topics are sometimes fairly different on both sites.
- gauravgupta 16y agoYou should sort the books by the number of times they have been quoted.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoThat was what I was doing initially, but actually it has (big) sideeffects: if you search Ruby and get the most quoted book, you get... an ASP.Net book! So I'm currently working on balancing textual relevance (eg: Ruby) with the number of quotes. Thanks for your feedback!
- benwerd 16y agoUseful, and also a neat way to make some side-cash via your affiliate link. I suspect I'll be checking this regularly. One thing that would be really handy - or at least interesting - is a "most recently mentioned" list. For example, when people were talking a lot about Program or be Programmed a while back, it would have been fun to see that rise to the top.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoIt may generate some side-cash via the affiliate links - it would certainly be useful to us. We'll see how it goes anyway :) The most recently mentioned list is a very good idea. I had something similar in mind, like a news-letter that would send the "most mentioned this month", so you can get the trends. Would you find that useful ?
- aik 16y agoI think it could be useful for sure. Both a most recently mentioned list, and most often mentioned list. I'm more interested in the latter as it is more telling.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoOverall I must work on making the data more exploreable, definitely. My pet peeve is allowing to find books quoted by X, where X is some instance of someone I appreciated on HN :) I think I will create a labs section with various experimentations like these, so people can try them out and see if it's useful.
- benwerd 16y agoPerhaps a combination, like a sort of TechMeme for books?
- joe_fishfish 16y agoIf making cash via an affiliate link is the goal, it would make sense to have the link to the user's localised Amazon site. I much prefer to buy from Amazon.co.uk as I'm UK-based so right now I'll just highlight-> right-click-> google the title and end up bypassing the affiliate link.
- adrianwaj 16y agoI'd track the comments page. http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments In this respect you'll see new Amazon links every so often in: http://twitter.com/hackerlinks http://twitter.com/hackerlinks (the tweet will begin with Amazon) http://hackerbra.in/links http://hackerbra.in/links This site is really a good idea. The Amazon links can get quite popular (I know from looking at my Amazon stats on @hackerlinks when I had the affiliate code inserted.)
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoI didn't know about this page - I'm currently doing a 2-days late crawling, so this will help me make it realtime instead. Thanks! I didn't know about hackerlinks either - just subscribed!
- adrianwaj 16y agoAn Amazon link will look like: http://twitter.com/#!/hackerlinks/status/39864047344029696 http://twitter.com/#!/hackerlinks/status/39864047344029696 Good luck! Perhaps I should make an Amazon only Hackerlinks-style feed! Or you could have one coming from your site of new books as they're added!
- d0m 16y agoWow, good idea. I've browsed it this morning and it's an excellent website. Some things I might add is a link to the context of where the book was cited and also better categorization. (i.e. effective C++ in compiler book). But otherwise, amazing. Thank you
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoThank you! I plan to display the actual conversation in some way on the site itself, if I can. Lot of people told me it would be useful. I will also work on some topic extraction, yes!
- o1iver 16y agoI agree about the context, very important to judge the value of the suggestion!
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoAbsolutely - thanks for commenting!
- jwomers 16y agoThis is a great idea, and executed well! Awesome!
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoThanks for the kind words! Really glad you (and others) like it after the time I spent on it :)
- dansingerman 16y agoThis is a great idea. Simple, yet effective, and well executed. I wish I'd thought of it.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoThank you! Really glad you like it.
- tallanvor 16y agoYou need to adjust your tokenization settings. --Searching for C, C++, and C# all return the same results right now.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoThank you - need to learn a bit more of solr to do that. I Will definitely to it!
- tallanvor 16y agoIt's probably not too difficult, although my guess is you'll have to refeed your content. Unfortunately I've never worked with solr so I can't offer suggestions on where the modifications need to be made.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoNo worries really - thanks already for giving the feedback. I know for sure it can be done with some configuration tweaking, not even sure I'll need to reindex. Thanks!
- savramescu 16y agoI can't see any book details / list now. I haz error 500.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoThanks, I'm diving into it currently.
- savramescu 16y agoWorks now.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoI've reduced the number of passenger instances, in hope to keep things alive until I can upgrade. Thank you for mentioning this!
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoFixed - I was out of memory slightly, which sent solr and mongodb to the graveyard. I need to upgrade memory a bit.
- marijn 16y agoNeeds more Eloquent JavaScript.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoAdded to my todo list, thanks!
- Jem 16y agoIs it possible to sort in different ways? Am guessing it's sorted by latest recommendation at the minute? I searched PHP and would like to see by # of recommendations...
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoNot yet! But I need to work on more sorting/filtering, definitely. It's currently sorted (in that order) by 1) textual relevance and second 2) number of quotes.
- troels 16y agoPerhaps you should put a note about this on the result page, as currently it looks like it's random.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoThat's a great suggestion - note taken :)
- HackrNwsDesignr 16y agoWhat language/tools did you use to build it?
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoI used: ruby 1.9.2, ETL (extract-transform-load), vagrant, chef, mongodb, redis, sunspot/solr, rails 3, cucumber, rspec. I plan to write a couple of blog posts explaining the "how" later on! It's been an interesting ride really.
- HackrNwsDesignr 16y agoAwesome. I recently ordered the well-grounded rubyist as I've heard great things about the book (though its on page #2 on your site). How long did it take you to complete the project?
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoIt took much too long: around 300 hours as of today. But a large part of it (the 2/3rds) was a learning exercise around chef and vagrant, which wasn't necessary to the project. Of the remaining third, I've got around 70% for data processing in general and 30% on pure front-end code and design. I really wanted to learn how to deal with sysadmin in a more productive fashion, so I took the plunge :)
- HackrNwsDesignr 16y agowould be interested to hear your learning experience in sysadmin.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoSince I started freelancing in 2005 I've always deployed my stacks myself, learning gradually. I always felt that doing it manually (even using well-written notes) then gradually home-baked tools was a loss of time. I looked at chef more than a couple of times, waiting for the documentation to be more available, and for feedback from people I know. I started using chef with the opscode platform, then went back to chef-solo as it really fits my needs already. I'm using it for client work as well as for everything behind HackerBooks (including Rails app deployment without capistrano anymore). The consequence is that I can boot a new ubuntu instance from scratch, completely configured with the whole stack (rvm, rails 3, passenger, nginx, solr, god, the properly configured crawler, data restored from a S3-like etc) in less than 15 minutes. I will never go back to manual sysadmin (apart from small tips) - this really fits my way of working. But it has been a time-sink to get in :) Hope I replied to your question properly, if I didn't, ask again!
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- KishoreKumar 16y ago"Which is the most quoted book"? or "What are the top 10 among most quoted books"? these were the questions going in my mind, while I'm browsing.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoJust wrote that down, thanks! I will probably come up with some kinds of list, and will definitely work on better sorting/filtering.
- marknutter 16y agoI wonder sometimes if it'd be worth creating a site that aggregates all the most useful and interesting information from social news sites like Reddit, HN, etc. like this site does for books on HN. I spent a long time finding all the best "life hacks" on Reddit the other day and really found some gems.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoWell working on this definitely gave me other ideas. I think overall, the online data should be more easily searchable/sliceable, at a user level...
- soapdog 16y agoI really liked the site, congratulations. Just because I am a stack freak, can you tell us more about your technology stack and how fun (or not) was to develop this?
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoThanks! See http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2249639 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2249639 (I will blog more about that later on as well).
- swombat 16y agoInteresting resource. Another related site would be DanielBMarkham's http://www.hn-books.com/ http://www.hn-books.com/ ...
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoYes I know about Daniel's site, which was released while I was working on hackerbooks.com. I decided to keep working on it anyway, but it took me a fair amount of time to release.
- bg4 16y agoI recently registered fivegoodbooks.com with the plans of trying to reduce choice aversion for technical books. i.e. the top 5 referenced books by the community to start learning a subject. This is really nice work, now I'm the one to have to decide if I keep working on it :)
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoThanks for your kind words! Well I can see myself using both sites, really :) That' what I learned from working on http://www.learnivore.com http://www.learnivore.com too - at the same time came out http://rubytu.be/ http://rubytu.be/, but I used both actually, and some people preferred one, some other the other. I encourage you to ship anyway :)
- jmm 16y agoNice domain name... got me thinking. I wish there existed a community I respected that curated books on all topics. Like, I'd love to have fivegoodbooks extend from topics like Ruby and Python to Russian History and Urban Planning. Another interesting idea maybe would be to map the annotations/bibliographies of all books, so I could start with books I've read and better see what kind of linkings exist. You could visually see the seminal works in a field and all the branchings. Maybe that already exists in some form?
- aridiculous 16y agoInteresting. I had a shower idea(tm) one morning where the combination of a rating and user-supplied biographical data at the time of the rating (e.g. "I was a novice with Python when I read it") determined a book's effectiveness. The idea was founded on the tendency that people are skill-biased when rating books. They might dislike a book for being confusing or too easy because it wasn't designed for them at the time of reading. This was an attempt to figure out which books were just bad, and which were only rated bad because they were read without proper experience (or too much). Ultimately, using community data, a visitor would be able to discover a "bookpath" of great resources that syncs up with their level of skill.
- mikecaron 16y agoWicked cool!
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoYou make me happy :)
- krat0sprakhar 16y agoThanks for this amazing initiative. Looking forward to more features.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoI welcome any feedback later on if you have ideas etc (use the form on the top of the site!).
- techarch 16y agoLove it! Nice clean and simple without the clutter of non-hacker type books!
- TheSOB88 16y agoSite looks great - really great - on a macro level, but when you get down to it, it doesn't really have the content I'm looking for. There's extreme misuse of the space on the page. When I was looking at Code Complete (a book I've been trying to get my hands on for a while), there is very little content about the book. The synopsis is cut off (!) and there are no reviews. But if you were trying to save space, why on the hells are there over 9000 books following in "quoted discussions"? You need to switch what you're truncating here. Also, I would suggest at least copying Amazon's ratings for some measure of book quality. For reference: http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/code-complete-a-practical-handbook-of-software-construction/0735619670 http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/code-complete-a-practical-ha...
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoHey - I understand what you mean, really. I really want to work on this specific page, and I'm actually frustrated to have released it this way :) Here's what's planned: - instead of cutting the book description like it's done currently, you'll be able to expand with a click - I'll do the same on books and quotes, because hundreds of books are not useful in the "suggested books list", definitely - and I want to focus more on getting the actual quotes to the front (eg: allow to read the actual quotes by HNers etc) because I feel it brings significant usefulness I'm mixed on the Amazon ratings, both because recent API changes made it unpractical to really use the content (it's now an iframe that must be used as is, and refreshed every 24 hours), and because sometimes the reviews are fake as well. So I'll try to bring more value by letting users know what people think on HN and SO. Would these points make the site more useful to you ?
- TheSOB88 16y agoDefinitely yes, though I don't know why it would be necessary to trim the synopsis at all in most cases.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoThanks! On the synopsis: well in some (too frequent) cases, the synopsis was just several pages long, so the related books and quotes were really, really hidden. I need to find a better middle ground. But in all cases, thanks for your critics, it will only help me make the site better.
- blparker 16y agoLove it. Thank you.
- thurn 16y agoI'd really love a feature where people could submit exercise solutions for books that don't include them. I find exercises a lot more useful if I have a solution to compare against.
- codeslush 16y agoThis is really nice looking. I am working on a concept that encapsulates part of what you've done here and I would love to have a discussion with you. I'm not ready to launch yet, but will be in a couple weeks. I gotta get moving quickly and you provide good motivation! Congrats!
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoI'm writing to you right now :)
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoI like it! Just last week I had two people email me with similar site ideas to hn-books.com, and when I launched hn-books 2 completely other people emailed me that they were working on similar sites. Must be something about hacker books that's in the water. Lots of sites with lots of features and such means better resources for all hackers, plus lots of folks getting experiences doing stuff like this. Most excellent! Since I've done this, I guess I should say something pithy or insightful. I think the trick is the navigation piece. I see you have categories -- that's probably a good place to start. I started with questions, you can go to my main page, click on the hacker-related question you have, and be presented with a sorted list of answers based on your experience. (see http://hn-books.com/ http://hn-books.com/ ) I'm not sure if questions are the way to go either, though, as there are a zillion questions hackers might ask. I'd still like to see somebody come up with some new ideas in this area. I also ran into the "just what are hacker books, anyway?" question that we get over here all of the time. I finally said screw it, I'll just put things that I believe are hacker-related. But I don't think there's any easy answer to that one, either. Outstanding site, though! I hope some of these other guys that have spoken to me will post what they've done as well.
- dionidium 16y agoJust last week I had two people email me with similar site ideas to hn-books.com, and when I launched hn-books 2 completely other people emailed me that they were working on similar sites. I'm not surprised. I've been working on my own half-baked version. Kudos to those of you who finished the baking.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoHi Daniel! thanks for your feedback! Your release of hn-books.com really made me realize I should carry on, that the topic was interesting (which I believed). But I was quite far from being able to ship and busy with a lot of client work, too. I totally agree that the navigation is the tricky part, and I have a lot of work to do on this :) I'm really curious to see other people approach to solve the general issue of finding useful books! In all cases, thanks for the kind words, appreciated!
- lefstathiou 16y agoi would appreciate a link to google books so i can preview the site.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoDo you mean some kind of google books widgets or similar ? I'm not aware of that, can you give more details ?
- nathanlrivera 16y agoFor books published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf, you should link directly to the publisher, in my opinion. PragProg.com sells DRM-free ebooks (in pdf, mobi, and epub) for cheaper than Amazon. They are a great value and I bet the PragProg folks keep more money this way, which is a good thing. For example http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/rails-for-net-developers-facets-of-ruby/1934356204 http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/rails-for-net-developers-fac... Should link to http://pragprog.com/titles/cerailn/rails-for-net-developers http://pragprog.com/titles/cerailn/rails-for-net-developers instead of Amazon.com.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoThat's a good suggestion (me being an avid reader of the pragprogs for a very long time). I'll try to make more "publisher-specific" linking.
- iconfinder 16y agoHave you been inspired by the design/structure of Iconfinder.com?
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoNope! I may have stumbled upon iconfinder once, but didn't use it as a model. Do you mean you find the sites look similar ? I wanted to keep the simplicity of Google if I could (hence the input/submit search). Otherwise no strict inspiration from any existing site afaik. EDIT: I did a closer analysis out of curiosity and the common points are: - the dual-color name - a google-y search input+button - the tagline with the number of items - a similar green Note that I definitely didn't use iconfinder as a model. I guess these are quite common characteristics.
- davidjhall 16y agoMinor bug report: I did a search on xbox (hoping to see Hacking the Xbox) and the Kinect system came up -- you are probably scrubbing against Amazon and it came up.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoActually currently the search takes both the title and the description into account. The Kinect book has "Xbox" in its description. Two conclusions: - how the search works needs some explanation a bit! - I will probably add an advanced search so you can specify exactly how you want the search to occur (eg: ignore the description....) Thanks for your feedback!
- mcn 16y agoI like it. I would love to see the comments without having to click through to hacker news or stack overflow.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoIt's planned! Definitely. You'll be able to read from the site as well as go to HN/SO if you wish (and for proper attribution, too).
- tejaswiy 16y agoOn a slightly unrelated note, are there any UX/UI books that are targetted for programmers? I'm a complete noob with photoshopping and can't create a button to save my life. Working on side projects, this is really annoying.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- tomrod 16y agoI am probably echoing many when I say: Great job! How can we rate individual books?
- Sakes 16y agoI knew exactly what your site offered and how to use it in the first 5 seconds. Awesome job, nice info layout.
- NnamdiJr 16y agoThank you, thank you, thank you so much for creating this!(and thank to the community for voting it up so i could see it)... I've been searching everywhere for book recommendations to help expand my knowledge of NLP and ML, then I suddenly click on this link and there it is! Great site!
- conjectures 16y agoGreat tool. Will save me a few awkward google queries site:ac.uk "reading list" x etc